Summary:
John Kannenberg, founder of the Museum of Portable Sound, discusses his journey into sound and the creation of his unique museum. The museum houses over 325 sounds stored on Kannenberg's iPhone and can only be visited by appointment. It incorporates elements of performance art and encourages conversations about the role of sound in our lives. Kannenberg emphasizes that his museum is different from a regular playlist as it focuses on the use and meaning of each sound. He sees the museum as a gift for strangers, aiming to change perceptions about sound. The experience crosses over into performance art, with Kannenberg adopting the role of a curator. He believes museums should be more human and accountable, which inspired him to create a personal and interactive museum.
Transcription:
Welcome to the audio.com podcast, where we talk to curators, artists and musicians about their sound-related practice. I'm Ilia Rogachevski and my guest today is John Kannenberg, founder and lead curator of the Museum of Portable Sound. Kannenberg holds a PhD in Museum Studies and Sonic Arts from the University of the Arts London and is a multimedia artist, curator, writer, field recordist and researcher whose work investigates the sonic geography of museums and archives, the psychology of collection, the process of making and observing art and the human experience of time.
Since 2015, Kannenberg has been curating the Museum of Portable Sound, a project that fuses the disciplines of field recording, sound studies and conceptual art. The museum currently has over 325 items spread across 30 galleries. All of the sounds are stored on Kannenberg's iPhone and the museum can only be visited by appointment, either in person or through an online Zoom session. An in-person visit requires a trip to the UK coastal city of Portsmouth, where John is currently based, but it's well worth the journey because the experience incorporates elements of performance art and encourages an open conversation about the role that sound plays in our lives with the curator himself.
Our conversation, however, took place over Zoom and I began by asking John about when it was that he first got interested in sound.
I would say probably when I was about eight years old and I was watching television and there was a documentary about the making of Star Wars. The documentary had a clip of Ben Burtt collecting the sound of what would become the base of all the laser blasts in Star Wars. So he was hitting a wire attached to a giant water tower and he was trying to figure out how to make the sound attach to a giant water tower and holding a microphone up to it.
That sound became the lasers and shortly after that, my brother and I were in a shopping mall in Milwaukee where I grew up and we discovered that if we would tap this one particular railing that was next to an escalator and if you would slap the metal on top, it made basically the same kind of sound and I stood there and slapped that thing for days.
How did you get to where you are today? So from that first laser sound, how did you get to become a curator of sound?
You know, I was always interested in playing around with sound. I just had sort of like hand-me-down microphones from my mother's all-in-one turntable radio and cassette player stereo that she had. I didn't know anything about electronics, but it was something that I was always interested in and I was always playing around with a little bit of recording gear and sound-related gear that I had. I tried to become a drummer. I did that for a long time.
In 1999, I bought a minidisc recorder and a really terrible lapel microphone and I started making field recordings and I found out about all this, all these other weirdos on the internet on the lowercase sound list.
My entry into it was to try to become an experimental musician. I'd never really studied music formally, so as you can probably imagine, my music wasn't all that great. And then late in life, I decided to go back to school. I had done an undergraduate degree in drawing and painting and I wanted to do a Master of Fine Arts in the U.S., which at the time was the equivalent of a PhD in other more so-called normal school disciplines.
The program that I was applying to at the University of Michigan was, it really stressed interdisciplinarity. And the day that I went there to do my in-person interview, I found out from the first round of people who went through that they were asking everyone, what other discipline do you intend to pursue while you're here? And I didn't have a plan. And so I kind of panicked and I was walking around the hallway and I saw a poster for something called the Museum Studies Program Graduate Certificate.
What it turned out to be was essentially getting an MA in Museum Studies while I was doing an MFA in Studio Art. So I entered the Museum Studies Program. In my art side of things, I was trying to do experimental music and I was thinking a lot about Pierre Schaeffer and sound objects. And we were talking about object theory and museum studies. And I was like, well, what if sounds were the objects in a museum? It took about five years from the moment that I first got interested in it until I actually made the museum.
I moved to London to do a PhD in 2014. And very shortly, I got invited to give a talk at my university in London and they wanted me to pitch a series of ideas for this talk. So I pitched three things, one of which was a grand opening event for the Museum of Portable Sound, which at that point was only an idea. They said, yeah, do that one. And so I had two weeks to put together a museum.
So after a nice little panic, I started going through all of my field recording archives because I started field recording in like 1999 when I got that minidisc recorder. I'd been thinking about how museums categorize the world and how those same categories could very easily be applied to a collection of sounds. So I came up with these four overarching categories, which became the four floors of the Museum of Portable Sound, which are natural history, science and technology, architecture and urban design, and art and culture.
I put together a 25-minute museum and I needed a way to play it to people. And before I moved to the UK, I bought my first smartphone, which was an iPhone 4S. I got to London and found out that the carrier from whom I had bought the iPhone was the only United States carrier at the time whose phones were not able to be unlocked and used in the UK or Europe. So I had, you know, four $500 brick just laying around.
So that's what I decided to use. And I put the sounds on there. I gave the talk and it just kind of took over my life from that moment on.
What makes your museum different from a regular playlist of sounds?
I have a mission statement. I have a collections policy. I try to collect sounds that aren't exactly music. The way I've organized these things have more to do with the actual use of the sound as it exists in the world rather than it being reinterpreted as entertainment or music.
So when people listen to the sounds, they're not just playing it in the background while they're driving or doing their laundry. They're listening primarily to one sound at a time and reading a label in a book that describes what that sound is and what it means and what it represents and how it functions. So although technically its form is music files, as Apple calls them, that have been arranged into albums within the music app on my iPhone.
But because they're intimately connected to this gallery guidebook that I've made, just listening to the sounds doesn't really give you the full experience. So you kind of need to hear the sound, read about it, or have me read about it to you as tends to happen when I do the online visits to the museum now. There are some big similarities. Like one of the things I talked about in my PhD were mixtapes back in the 80s and 90s and how my creation of this museum relates back to that for me personally because I did that so much and I really worked hard on them.
I sweated over them. I planned them and they always had a purpose and I thought of them as like a gift for someone. After doing the museum for a couple of years, it finally hit me that I kind of put this together as a gift for strangers in a way. It's stuff to listen to that I've sequenced to try to tell stories or change perceptions about how sound functions in the world, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, of course, because mixtapes are more about context, aren't they?
Yeah, there's a lot of that to what I've done. The conceptual trappings around this project, like calling it a museum, having a gallery guide, having a map, like a visual map of what's on the phone, which doesn't relate to an actual architectural space. It's just like a thought space. But then like I call myself a curator, I show up with white gloves and a coat check and a little clicker to count people.
And so I've put all this other stuff into the experience that helps people to interpret this stuff, not as music or as a playlist, but as a museum experience. It starts to feel more like they are in a museum rather than just sitting somewhere random listening to some crazy old man's phone. I would even go as far as to say that it crosses over into performance art. Yes, I agree with that wholeheartedly. When I started doing it, I was pretending to be a curator.
I would commit to the fact that this was a museum on a phone. And I would use sort of my natural, sarcastic, crotchety old man personality to try to almost intimidate people into believing it. Like I try to start every encounter as formally as I can, and then very quickly just drop the mask so that when people initially encounter me, they think, oh, he's a doctor and he's a curator. And then when I feel like that's been imprinted on them enough, I just abandon it and just start saying very opinionated, goofy things.
I've always loved museums, but once I started actually studying them, I learned many, many, many horrible things about their past and their initial creation and how a lot of the collections were built. Most museums don't express their own humanity. They hide behind their institutionality and you never get to meet a curator and they're never held accountable for what they've done. And I've put this together in a very particular way so that people had no choice but to talk to me and I had no choice but to listen to their feedback.
And so that's why I did this essentially to represent that museums are human institutions. They're human places and there are people responsible for what they do.
You mentioned the museum's physicality. It exists within your iPhone 4S and it's called the Museum of Portable Sound. And I want to sort of unpack the idea of portability. Isn't sound by its very nature portable? And how do you define this idea of portable sound within the context of your museum?
That's a very good question. So when I was first coming up with the name for the museum, I wasn't sure what to call it. I didn't want to call it the Museum of Sound because that domain name was already taken. So I was just playing around with different terms and I came up with Museum of Portable Sound and to me it meant nothing. It was mainly just meant as a reference to the fact that the museum itself is portable. That name, it had the same like flavor when you say it as, you know, the Museum of Contemporary Art or something like that.
It was the right amount of syllables. And I thought that because the museum was just based on my field recordings at first, I thought there might come a time where I might run out of things to say about my field recording. And so if I call it the Museum of Portable Sound, maybe then I can start talking about, I don't know, like Walkmans and transistor radios and stuff. As I kept working on the museum, the idea of sound being portable, it finally started to coalesce in my head as to what I believed that to mean.
This museum deals with sound that can be moved from one place to another, which is incredibly broad, but that way I could talk about things like radio broadcasting, walkie-talkies, but also the fact that this museum was about sharing sound between me and a visitor or a couple of visitors at a time. So it was about carrying sound and giving it to someone else or moving it to a different place. And because that idea is very nebulous, it's allowed me to talk about a lot more things than I ever really imagined I would talk about.
What's your criteria for inclusion of sound objects? So that's physical objects and recordings. Is there anything that you'll say, no, you know what, that sounds nice, but it's not relevant for this museum? When I first put the museum together, which was back in like 2014 and 15, around that time, pretty much every sound project was somehow based around crowdsourcing field recordings and throwing them up on a website, usually with a Google map as the interface. And I was really not interested in doing that.
I wanted this to have a different feeling. So when I first started, I was really limited by what field recordings I had in my collection. So the vast majority of what was on it was things that I had recorded and I had sort of heard and decided to share with people. And then as more people started finding out about it, and the first group or type of people that was finding out about it were other people who make field recordings, and a lot of those people were like, well, you should put this recording that I made of blah, blah, blah in the museum.
And almost to a number, every one of them I thought was not anything I was really interested in. In terms of including recordings, it's mostly about trying to include things that support the idea of these sounds being objects in a museum. So, like the museum has these four main categories. And so I want the sounds to fit under those categories. And even though they're rather broad, I feel like there needs to be something museal or museum-like about the sound.
It doesn't have to be an historical event, but it should have some sort of cultural connection. The very first person to donate a sound was Cheryl Tipp from the British Library Sound Archive. And she gave me the digitization that they had only recently made of the world's first commercially available recording of Bird Song, which was a German record from like 1910 or 11. At the time, it had no relationship to anything else in the museum. And I was kind of like, oh God, what do I do? Like, I didn't understand then how to make it work within the context of the rest of the museum.
Now I do, because now I have enough other recordings of Bird Song and other animal recordings and things. And I've tried to expand the natural history section quite a bit. So, I was really trying to focus on only accepting sounds that were related to stories that I wanted to tell. After that, the next sound that I accepted actually was something that I begged for, because I was hanging around with a colleague of mine at University of Arts London named Khaled Kaddal, an Egyptian field recordist.
So, he happened to mention that he had this field recording that he'd made of the exact moment that Mubarak stepped down from power in Egypt during the Egyptian revolution. And it wasn't a recording from Tahrir Square. It was actually a recording from Alexandria, where Khaled is from, but it was the exact moment. And it's this amazing recording of people just cheering and chanting and singing and acquiring that sound. I already had a couple of sounds from protests, but it felt like it gave more weight to my little collection of protest recordings.
I'm interested in stuff that will help me either fill in gaps or sounds that just feel to me like they belong in a museum, which is kind of the point of the whole project. When it comes to the physical objects, I never intended to collect physical objects for the museum. It just happened. As soon as people heard Museum of Sounds, they started throwing physical objects at me, basically. One of my colleagues donated her old minidisc recorder.
And then, almost immediately after that, another fellow student gave me her grandmother's AM radio from the Ukraine. One guy I met was traveling to London from Canada, and he donated a vintage Sony Sports Walkman. The physical objects collection is kind of an accidental collection, and people just keep giving me stuff. When the pandemic hit, I was really looking for more ways of engaging with the museum's online audience, so things I could post about on social media.
And so collecting interesting old vintage sound-related objects became more of an active part of what I was trying to do for the museum. In terms of physical objects, not only am I interested in vintage gear, but I'm trying to find things that represent non-musical uses of sound, or objects that make sound and it's inherently part of its identity, like egg-shaped egg timers, police whistles. One really cool object that I have is a cassette tape of software from the 1980s, back when people stored their software on regular cassette audio tapes.
And it's actually got a recording on this cassette. Whoever had it accidentally started taping over part of it, and that's something that used to happen all the time to kids and their home computers in the 80s. So I have this amazing, authentic moment. So it's trying to find objects that not only represent major developments in sound-related technology, but also things where you find sound playing a huge role in either the use of the object or in someone's culture. And using those objects to tell these stories about how sound isn't just playlists and music and albums and concerts.
Do you have a favorite object, maybe a favorite sound, currently in the museum?
I have more than one. In the museum's gallery guide, there's a curator's top 40 list, like a guided tour where you can listen to my 40 favorite sounds in the museum, just because people started asking me that question. I honestly have two favorite sounds.
One is humorous, and the other one is serious. The funny one is the sound of me falling off of a camel next to the Great Pyramid in Egypt. And then the serious one is another sort of accidental recording that I made in San Francisco in 2008. And I was just there on vacation. And it turned out I was in San Francisco the day of the tide parade and had no knowledge of it. And so I woke up in the hotel, had breakfast, walked out the door and heard this sort of incredibly loud cloud noise way off in the distance.
I had no idea what it was. And so I kept walking towards it, turned the corner and suddenly I was in the middle of the San Francisco pride parade. And 2008 happened to be the year that California voted to legalize gay marriage. I was standing on the side of the street with the parade going by for probably no more than five or 10 minutes. And a marching band that identified themselves as a lesbian marching band came through, stopped right in front of where I was standing, and played Chapel of Love, which people probably know more as Going to the Chapel.
They played that song and the crowd just roared like I'd never really heard a crowd roar before. And to this day, every time I hear that recording, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It's the closest I think I've ever come to recording just pure human joy. Going to the chapel, going to the chapel of God.
What has been the most memorable public reaction to your museum?
So that would probably be a year or two after starting it. I had a visit from a sound artist from Paris and we met in a cafe in London. He spent about a half an hour listening to stuff in the museum and reading the gallery guide very thoroughly. After about a half an hour, he closed the book, said, I'm done. And I said, what did you think of it? And he said, oh, I hated it. And I just thought, this is awesome. No one's ever said anything bad.
And it's probably because I'm sitting here in front of them. And this guy, because I don't know him, he's finally letting me have it. And so I was like, great. What is it that you don't like about it? And he said, what you've got here, you have this book and in this book, it says things like in this gallery, this object is the sound of the bells on a cathedral. And then I go to the phone and I press the object in the music app and it's the sound of the bells of a cathedral.
And I said, yeah. And he said, yeah, that's terrible. And I was like, why is it terrible? And he said, because it's too much like a real museum. And I find museums oppressive. And I thought, well, yeah, I mean, there are some very oppressive aspects to museums, but what is oppressive about this? Well, what should I do? How should I fix it? And he said, if I were doing this museum in the book, it would say this object is going to be the sound of a cathedral.
And then when you would press it on the phone, what you would hear would be a porn soundtrack. So, you know, what could have been a really good opportunity for a critique turned into just kind of an awkward moment, but it did get me to think about like, is it bad that this thing is so literal? After that happened, I thought about it for a long time and I decided that he was just wrong.
The Museum of Portable Sound also has a very strong online presence, particularly on your Instagram accounts. And one of the memes that comes up again and again is this conflict between music and sound art. And you've even created a flowchart, something along the lines of like, is your composition, music or sound art? And you go down the flowchart. And essentially, you always arrive to the fact that it's music and not sound art. What is the difference between sound art and music?
Sound art has always been sort of porous and nebulous and not really well defined. And the trend now in academic circles is to not define it. On the surface, the reasoning behind that is that it would be too limiting to define it. Whereas I'm pretty sure the reasoning behind not defining it is because it would mean that some people who claim to be sound artists, who really are just experimental musicians, wouldn't be able to get that sweet, sweet sound art grant money from art museums and galleries. But anyway, I think at one point, there may have been some things that could be called sound art legitimately.
In the early 60s, Robert Morris made this thing called Box with the Sound of Its Own Making. It's like it's a wooden box and he recorded the sound of himself making it. And inside the box is a tape recorder that plays the tape. I think it's brilliant. And I think it could possibly be called sound art. I think it's more just conceptual art to me that just happens to use sound. But then as experimental music started to have more and more of a moment and the word sound and sound art specifically started to gain traction as an academic buzzword.
And that was right around the turn of the 21st century. And there was this one specific exhibition in London in, I think, 2000 called Sonic Boom, curated by David Toop. And he put together a gallery show full of experimental musicians. Because that show was such a big success and had so many visitors, I think that show did a lot to coalesce this notion that experimental music is sound art. So just like playing experimental music in a gallery space makes it art somehow.
And to me, that doesn't cut it. There's some people who seem like they themselves have this figured out. They know the difference in their minds between what's sound art and what's experimental music. There's this one paper that Christoph Koch wrote. At the beginning of it, he rattles off names of like five or six different artists. And he actually categorizes them as either composer or sound artist. But you haven't defined your terms. Like what makes this guy a sound artist? And what makes this guy a composer? If it is this notion of if you do it in a gallery that makes it art, then what about the concerts that Steve Reich and Philip Glass did at the Guggenheim in the early 70s? Is Philip Glass a sound artist because of that? Like, really? Are you seriously going to tell me that? I mean, ever since this sort of confluence happened where experimental music and sound art kind of bled into each other, it hasn't really ever gone away.
And I think it's made it nearly impossible to tell any difference if there is a difference. And by everyone refusing to declare a difference, it sort of defeats the whole purpose of having a term called sound art, in my opinion. What if biologists suddenly started saying, well, we don't want to define biology because that's too limiting. They would be laughed out of the academy. The term sound studies was created as a way to talk about non-musical sound.
It developed out of this movement called sound history, an area of discussion that was meant to talk about sound culture. And it was meant to be separate from musicology and ethnomusicology. And now that's all bled together. Sound art got mixed in there as well. Like this whole sound studies, sound art milieu merged into this big amorphous soup that is kind of bland and means nothing to me now.
It feels like it undermines music as well, as if music can't be conceptual.
Right, exactly. It doesn't do the art world or the music world any favours. Like you say, it undermines the importance of both of them. Like in the classical realm, so-called Western white person, European classical music tradition (there's this thing) called extended technique, where you make sounds with instruments in ways that they weren't designed to make sound. That's a thing in music. That's not a sound art technique. That's a thing in music that's long established. So like just pretending that now suddenly that that's art just seems really cavalier to me.
Nobody thinks that music isn't an art form. So if you're making artsy music, that's a thing. It doesn't have to be sound art. It can just be music. And that's fine because music's great. And it has history and heritage to it. So that's how I feel.
